This section describes approaches that could be employed, but are not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or employed. Hence, unless explicitly specified otherwise, any approaches described in this section are not prior art to the claims in this application, and any approaches described in this section are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) is attempting to propose standards that can be applied to wireless devices for the stringent requirements of deterministic networks (e.g., minimal jitter, low latency, minimal frame loss). For example, Low power and Lossy Networks (LLNs) allow a large number (e.g., tens of thousands) of resource-constrained devices (e.g., sensors or “motes”) to be interconnected to form a wireless mesh network. The IETF has proposed a routing protocol (“6TiSCH”) that provides IPv6 routing using time slotted channel hopping (TSCH) based on IEEE 802.15.4e, enabling LLN devices to use low-power operation and channel hopping for higher reliability. The 6TiSCH architecture specifies a Channel distribution/usage (CDU) matrix of “cells”, each cell representing a unique wireless channel at a unique timeslot following an initial epochal time (T=0).
Hence, a TSCH schedule can be allocated to a network device based on broadcast of a beacon message, where a network device can identify a prescribed allocated channel hopping sequence based on receiving a unique sequence offset that identifies a shifted position within a repeating (i.e., circular) default channel hopping sequence, relative to a timeslot value (e.g., an Absolute Slot Number (ASN)). A problem exists, however, that time slotted schedules can interfere with each other.